If you follow the Prop link, the article says that the state of california reduced theft under that amount to a misdemeanour because there wasn't enough room in prisons to keep people arrested for it.

Quite a different motivation than SF decriminalizing things

It was a ballot proposition. That was the stated reasoning of its proponents but assigning motivation for why a referendum came out the way it did is a fools errand. The actual reasons why millions of people voted the way they did will invariably be multi-causal and include things no one in their right mind would consider condensed down to one “Yes” vote.

I remember that vote, and crowding in the prisons wasn’t even a consideration for how I voted because if we wanted to resolve that issue we would build more prisons; therefore it was a useless justification in either direction. In truth, the sum of our choices in California does not make it look like we care about crowding in the prisons, only that we care about looking like we care. It’s been more than 15 years since the first time I read an article about how our prisons are overcrowded, and they’re still overcrowded.

We already have the highest prison population of any country on earth, why would you think the solution is building more prisons?

Because you either stop prosecuting people or you build more prisons, or you stop pretending to care one way or the other about how crowded the existing prisons are.

Even if you think there’s some measure of criminal justice reform that could be done to reduce the headcount in the future in the State of California’s prison system, you build the damn prisons now to address specifically: overcrowding in the prisons, and then if some future opportunity arises to raze some of the older prisons because they are no longer needed because the prison population has been reduced, then you do that. Or you don’t, and we haven’t, so that’s clearly what our choice is: not caring in the abstract. Given that, I have no patience for the people that pretend otherwise.

Due to inflation, this will soon be irrelevant.

I hear this one a lot, but it's not "decriminalization". Prop 47 reduced theft under $950 to a misdemeanor from a felony. A misdemeanor is not decriminalization! Not even close. You can go to jail for a misdemeanor.

This is actually pretty normal nationwide (and also a rather conservatively low dollar number.) Fun fact: Did you know Texas' limit, yes texas, is $2500?

I don't think that reduction is the reason for an increase in crime and is more of a red herring and distraction. The real reason is a mix of ineffective policing (which is a product of both police being bad at their job and police being afraid to do their job because of ill will towards them) and ineffective prosecution.

Those problems have led to what feels like a "decriminalization" of theft, but that's not the law's problem. I promise you, SF would still be having these problems if this law didn't exist. (Hell, the highly publicized daylight ransacking of the Louis Vutton in Union Square shows how this law is irrelevant. Very few things in that store are under $950!)

>> I don't think that reduction is the reason for an increase in crime

I don't have anything empirical but in my experience the frequency and brazenness of the shoplifting (in SF) increased in a very noticeable way soon after the passage of Prop 47.

I know, I feel the same way, but the data doesn't indicate this. Be careful with "ancedata".

http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/images/screen_shot_2021-06-...

The one place you do see a dramatic impact is car break ins. But even that is a result of a broken relationship between the DA's office and the SFPD. The fact is, the SFPD is shitty at it's job (close rates are comically low, its understaffed, heaving demoralized) and the DA doesn't have people to prosecute.

This is really a problem as well in Barcelona with theft under €400 not being criminalized.

Pickpocketing has just become a job. There are still fines but the gangs just write them off as business expenses. It's ridiculous.